A Tisket, a Tasket, an Apollonian Gasket

In the spring of 2007 I had the good fortune to spend a semester at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, an institution of higher learning that takes “higher” to a whole new extreme. Perched precariously on a ridge far above the University of California at Berkeley campus, the building offers postcard-perfect vistas of the San Francisco Bay, 1,200 feet below. That’s on the west side. Rather sensibly, the institute assigned me an office on the east side, with a view of nothing much but my computer screen. Otherwise I might not have gotten any work done.

However, there was one flaw in the plan: Someone installed a screen-saver program on the computer. Of course, it had to be mathematical. The program drew an endless assortment of fractals of varying shapes and ingenuity. Every couple minutes the screen would go blank and refresh itself with a completely different fractal. I have to confess that I spent a few idle minutes watching the fractals instead of writing.

One day, a new design popped up on the screen (see the figure above). It was different from all the other fractals. It was made up of simple shapes—circles, in fact—and unlike all the other screen-savers, it had numbers! My attention was immediately drawn to the sequence of numbers running along the bottom edge: 1, 4, 9, 16 … They were the perfect squares! The sequence was 1-squared, 2-squared, 3-squared, and so on.

Before I became a full-time writer, I used to be a mathematician. Seeing those numbers awakened the math geek in me. What did they mean? And what did they have to do with the fractal on the screen? Quickly, before the screen-saver image vanished into the ether, I sketched it on my notepad, making a resolution to find out someday.

As it turned out, the picture on the screen was a special case of a more general construction. Start with three circles of any size, with each one touching the other two. Draw a new circle that fits snugly into the space between them, and another around the outside enclosing all the circles. Now you have four roughly triangular spaces between the circles. In each of those spaces, draw a new circle that just touches each side. This creates 12 triangular pores; insert a new circle into each one of them, just touching each side. Keep on going forever, or at least until the circles become too small to see. The resulting foam-like structure is called an Apollonian gasket (see the figure at right).

Something about the Apollonian gasket makes ordinary, sensible mathematicians get a little bit giddy. It inspired a Nobel laureate to write a poem and publish it in the journal Nature. An 18th-century Japanese samurai painted a similar picture on a tablet and hung it in front of a Buddhist temple. Researchers at AT&T Labs printed it onto T-shirts. And in a book about fractals with the lovely title Indra’s Pearls, mathematician David Wright compared the gasket to Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat:

The cat takes off his hat to reveal Little Cat A, who then removes his hat and releases Little Cat B, who then uncovers Little Cat C, and so on. Now imagine there are not one but three cats inside each cat’s hat. That gives a good impression of the explosive proliferation of these tiny ideal triangles.